On Decolonizing Theatre

This Sawyer Seminar series focuses on stimulating multi-disciplinary and multi-perspectival conversations across the performing arts and humanities to build capacities for producing repertoires from the period 1660-1830 in ways that address twenty-first-century issues of social justice, racial reckoning and restitutions, and intersectional identities. Seminars are sequenced to feature 1) leading examples of “decolonized theatre” productions, then 2) upcoming projects in preparation process, while building national, regional, and civic networks and encouraging critical perspectives and skill-sets among Northwestern participants. Faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates with a wide variety of entrée points are integral to the Seminars, culminating in two kinds of events: multi-disciplinary workshops of “paper projects” in decolonized production concepts, and a summer institute for graduate students on decolonizing theatre in the USA and transnational comparative contexts.